Another great piece from Jalopnik.
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The site found that despite millions being invested in cycling infrastructure across America, the number of people regularly riding to work has fallen by 75,000 compared with pre-pandemic levels.
This is such bullshit. If you follow the links it does lead to a number or even a lot of investment. Some cities improving stuff but they are also counting people buying e-bikes, and entire cities buying bike fleets. You can spend billions on buying bikes if you want, that's not "infrastructure".
"Millions" across the US is a laughable investment. European cities individually spend more than that, because it's cheaper than maintaining roads for cars, adding more lanes of highways, and climate change.
I bet you the amount of money being poured into new highways is 100x was is being done for bikes.
I latched onto the same stat, but for a different reason. What percentage of those 75,000 don't ride to work because they are now working from home?
I don't ride to work anymore, but I put in more miles than ever. 30 miles round trip to grab a beer with a friend on Saturday afternoon, hell yeah! Sometimes I go out on my lunch breaks to wake up and re-energize myself.
I bet you the amount of money being poured into new highways is 100x was is being done for bikes.
You're a orders of magnitude off. Let's assume "millions" means 10 million. I'm also going to generously assume 10 million per year, rather than the more likely 10 million over a couple years.
With those figures highway and street spending is 13,000 more.
Edit: I just reread and saw NEW construction. I don't have that figure.
Edit 2: on secons look, that 130 $bn spending nust be new roads; that looks like insufficient maintaince for the 161,000 mi of highways in the USA, let alone all other roads.
Indeed. How much money per mile of 4-lane stroad with a center turn lane? Is it a million dollars a mile?
I'm about five miles from my work with OK bike infrastructure to get there. My problem is every dickhead rolling coal on a lifted F350 seems to think I'm worth 500 points. Until they either protect the biking infrastructure or hit these people driving massive vehicles with some real pentalities for driving like idiots, I'll have to keep using my car for safety.
i wonder if the self-driving cars will make bicycling safer or more dangerous? the recent shrug and pray approaches to the software aren't reassuring enough
Physically separate bike paths (like not connected to roads. A.k.a multiuse paths) and bike first intersections are going to be the safest way forward.
Self-driving cars can be safer in some ways, but not always.
Given the fact they are still running over pedestrians, I wouldnt hold a lot of hope.
I sometimes bike to work (~15 miles each way), but fortunately to have a trail I can take a good chunk of the ride to work.
Unfortunately I get off after-dark and its closed (I wouldn't ride it at night even if it were technically open), so stuck riding a sometimes poorly lit stroad for a five-mile stretch home that's down to 1-lane much of the way because of never-ending construction with no shoulder or bike lane (plus stroads most of the other 10 miles home). I couldn't recommend the ride to anyone until the construction is gone. Would be great if they'd put some protected bike lanes there though, but given the trails available during the day, non-night riders and non-bike commuters would probably feel like its redundant.
Why is the trail closed?
We have a portion of a trail that closes for no reasonable purpose at like 5pm. We've been fighting to keep it open–lanes of car traffic don't just close unless it goes through private property. Why should bike trails?
Its an unlit winding trail along a steep drop off with pigs (and I do not mean cops - another part of the trail is directly on their station and I've never had any issue riding there at night: its lit, ironically by car dealerships, and not along a steep drop off; it also does have pigs out hunting at night though).
Huh. Is there a reason a fence doesn’t work there? If pigs were wandering into a road, both the owner and the city would want to eliminate that conflict
Its a nature trail meant for well-off office-workers to go for recreation during the day, so they're not going to build several miles of fencing for poorer people to commute at night. Pigs are primarily nocturnal, so they're not an issue during the day.
Also roads obstructing wildlife migration is already a problem. We shouldn't be trying to expand that.
I recommend getting some bright lights. I have a 350 lumens rear light that makes my bike more visible than most vehicles.
Switch to using an ebike this year, so it has its built in light, I have another rear light that blinks (not very bright and turned so its not directly facing drivers), and recently got a helmet with a front and rear light. Also wear bright clothes and have reflective stickers on my bike and stripes on pannier. I still don't trust some of the cars given passing in-lane is the only option for them to pass and the lane is too narrow for that.
in-lane is the only option for them to pass and the lane is too narrow for that.
In this case the correct thing to do legally is to take the whole lane, but I get that having cars honking at you is stressful.
biking to work for me means 35 miles of hilly country roads full of speeding trucks. wish I could lol
I started with a 15min commute to the train, 40 lin train ride, 35min bikeride up some KNARLEY hills…but on the way home it was downhill… Then moved cities and was 10min away, which became 1hr 25min training (I'm just commuting i told my brain)…then gota promotion and that was 75mi, 2-3.5hr commute in LA. Pretty soon after we moved away feom all that, live 5min walk from our restaurant & 500m from the med. I hated riding in the US…City bus drivers were THE WORST.
Aside from the problems cited in the article, I also find the routing of bike lanes in my area to be confusing as a cyclist and driver. Going from the shoulder, to between a traffic lane and parking lane, to even splitting the center lane with minimal barriers. The transitions from one lane position to the next almost always feels dangerous. If we could get some consistency it would help a lot. Don’t even get me started about the bike lanes that just suddenly end and require a merge with traffic without any signage.
I just want affordable bicycle enclosures so I can bike somewhere without getting destroyed by weather. I'll figure out the parking after.
Or public transport 
I wonder why commuting percentage is higher in Canada, the infrastructure is no better here
No way, New York City is a shitty place to live? Next you'll tell me water is wet or something. Mind blown.
It’s not for everyone, but “shitty place to live” isn’t at all true.
Yes it is. You pay a fortune to live in a hovel and have to share the sidewalk with drug addicts and gangs. Breathe deep and appreciate that smell of sewage everyday.
Different strokes for different folks. Instead of shitting on something, we can simply say "it is not for me because of X and Y".
The problem is there's a lot of people that want to push that lifestyle on every single human being. They want to pretend every person wants to live in a city. They want to pretend cities have no problems.
The problem is there’s a lot of people that want to push that lifestyle on every single human being
I suspect you misunderstand what these people want. Let's use myself as an example, I am as opposed to suburbs as they come. Does it mean I am opposed to you living in a suburb? No. I am opposed to:
- Zoning laws forcing large residential developments to contain only single-family homes, rather than allowing mixed-use medium density communities. You wouldn't want your preferred type of development to be banned, either.
- Our streets where we live being designed with the primary goal of maximizing the number of cars passing through them, like they are today. You wouldn't want heavy car traffic in front of your home, either.
- My children wasting 100 minutes of time every day commuting to school because our city planners did a terrible job, when their school should be within a safe 15 minute bicycle ride. You wouldn't want your kids to be wasting their life in traffic, either.
We largely want the same things. The main difference I see is that I'm looking for ways to improve my lifestyle in a way that doesn't automatically decrease the quality of life of other people, such as driving my car in front of their homes at all times of the day or making their neighborhoods unwalkable.
Car-dependent city planning is causing all these problems.
Theres a lot of people that pretend the opposite, as well. We are all biased towards the thing we like. Its obvious cities are popular, because they are expensive. Its also obvious suburbs are popular, because they alsoare axpensive.
What people mostly wish is that more city could be built, becausethe demand forcity living is still highar than that for suburbs.
Lol have you…been to New York? Because it doesn’t sound like it.
I go there twice a week. Into the boroughs though. Haven't been on Manhattan in a few years.
So you know how absurd your comment was. MAYBE you could say what you said about parts of Manhattan, but the boroughs are entirely different. South Brooklyn you have beach front property—and varied styles of neighborhoods at that, north Brooklyn you have dense urban centers intercut with quiet, tree lined neighborhoods and clean brownstones, queens you have a lot of places that feel like you’ve left the city entirely for more dense suburban living, bronx, yeah it’s very dense urban, like Manhattan but entirely different, and then Staten Island is like an entirely different state.
So again, I really don’t know what you mean. You can find so many different types of areas throughout the five boroughs. Yeah, you can find loud, dense and dirty areas, but you can find the exact opposite—or really almost anything.
